We have been busy preparing the school for re-opening in September. While we await government advice on the reopening of schools, due in the coming weeks, we want to share some of our planning at this stage.
All staff have worked to prepare classrooms and protocols in order to help us meet a range of scenarios that may face us in September. Our intention is to be ready for all eventualities, so that learning for our students can be seamless during the upcoming term and beyond.
Scenarios and planning:
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On-site learning with social distancing and hygiene protocols:
We are hopeful that school will be open, with some modifications, in September. We have plans in place, in line with government Daycare guidelines, to keep our school community safe. This will include changes to our cleaning protocols, temperature checks on arrival, new routines at drop-off and collection and playtimes. We will implement advice around the wearing of face-masks, hand washing and hand sanitiser. Classrooms have been set up to enable reasonable/appropriate social distancing. Learning resources have also been evaluated to ensure safe use.
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Blended learning:
Should the government mandate a maximum group-size in classrooms, we have made plans for how in-school learning can be delivered alongside home-learning. In this scenario, larger classes may be split into smaller groups. One group would receive on-site learning while the other accesses online home-learning. Groups would then rotate to ensure that all children have access to their teacher and on-site learning, as well as being prepared to complete home-learning tasks effectively.
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Online home-learning:
We have prepared for the eventuality that school is instructed to close by continuing to train and prepare our staff for online learning provision. Additional training will continue ahead of the new term in September. Our online home-learning provision will follow a more structured school day, enabling students to receive live teaching alongside their peers while continuing to provide some flexibility for families that need it. The structure of the day will include: a number of daily live lessons in the morning and afternoons; scheduled tasks to be submitted online; break-times and lunch-times.
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Learning platform:
We are in the process of linking our Seesaw learning platform to the live video-conferencing element of our provision. This should make it much easier for children to access their live lessons each day, as well as helping them to work more independently on any tasks set.
In the meantime, we recommend that all families plan
to obtain the following items, which we feel will form an essential part of the coming school year:
- a laptop/tablet device to support learning. Even in school, our bank of computing devices will likely be unavailable due to COVID-19 protocols.
- comfortable face masks. We recommend that children have multiple face masks, so that they have a change after breaktimes/PE or when needed.
Our new school year will begin on Wednesday 2nd September.